Scintillation
by brazenbell
Summary: Christine's mind knows that Erik is gone. Her feet are unconvinced.
1. Raoul

Raoul is not stupid.

He is young and naïve and idealistic, but not stupid.

He knows Christine's habits and what they mean.

He knows where she goes when she gets up in the middle of the night and sneaks out of their bedroom in her coat and his shoes. He sees the circles under her eyes and the premature wrinkles that line her mouth. He recognizes the shadows that haunt her face.

He watches the death eat away at her flesh. And as her heart decays, so does his, because he loves her. He has always loved her.

Still, he does nothing to stop this unnatural decay, despite the fact that it kills him too. For who is he to interfere with Fate?

* * *

One night she does not come back.

She slips out the door at eleven o'clock, an hour after they go to bed. Before leaving, she gives him a light kiss on the cheek, making sure that he is asleep. In reality, Raoul does not sleep any more than she does, but he fakes it, because he knows she needs this and if he stops her she will die even sooner, probably at her own hand. And he cannot pretend to let her go.

He lies awake through the night, staring at the cracked ceiling and squinting through the starlight that shines through the velvet curtains. He can no longer bear to look at the stars. They remind him too much of her – constantly twinkling even in darkness, but always in danger of being snuffed out.

Eventually, every star dies.

Slowly the starlight is replaced by sun, and the shadows that haunt his room are banished, and Christine has not returned.

Another hour passes. Raoul does not get up. He never gets up until she is beside him. He doesn't want her to know that he knows she's been gone.

Finally she returns at noon, just as he is emerging from the sheets. Her hair is mussed and her eyes are wild, and she babbles out a stream of cheap lies –

"I'm so sorry, Raoul! I couldn't sleep last night and so I went out for a walk and this man – he was – oh, Raoul, it was terrifying! He took me and – I barely made it out of there – I didn't mean to frighten you, do tell me I didn't scare you, darling?"

He holds her in her panic. "I'm not scared, Christine."

Fear is the least of his problems. After everything they've been through, Raoul can handle a little fear.

His mouth quirks into a crooked smile. There is more truth than falsehood in what she says. A man _did_ take her, long ago. But she has yet to make it out alive.

* * *

She never makes it back by morning again.

He tells her to stop lying. "Christine, I _know_ this isn't true," he hisses after one particularly elaborate and barefaced yarn. "And I don't care if you don't tell me the truth. I don't want to know. But stop telling me _this_."

She gazes up at him out of shattered eyes, and Raoul feels his heart break a little more. Because he is _meant_ for this girl.

But that doesn't mean she is meant for him.


	2. Christine

Christine does not love Erik.

She does not love him, she tells herself, she can't, she couldn't. A monster like that, didn't you see his _face_?

She rolls over in bed and gazes at Raoul's face, timidly stroking his skin with the tips of her fingers. Such a perfect, innocent face. A face like hers.

She and Raoul are meant to be, she knows. They are both beautiful and kindhearted and sweet and talented. They are both scarred and haunted by creatures and dreams beyond their understanding.

Christine looks away and closes her eyes, letting the ghostly face of the Phantom float behind the darkness. Christine and Erik. Christine and Raoul.

_I want to see him._

You can't.

_I want to see him, Christine._

This is not Christine who speaks inside her. This is not Christine who slides out from between the covers and silently finds her coat and slips on Raoul's shoes – hers won't do for a long walk – and sneaks out the door.

This is not Christine who returns to the Opera House and returns to the lake and finds the boat and rows to the little house, all alone.

But it is Christine who crawls into the house and finds her way to the sitting room, and there is the organ, that massive, formidable instrument where Erik sat and wrote his _Don Juan Triumphant_.

And it is Christine who cries.

* * *

She keeps going back. She returns, week after week, to sleep with her poor, lonely Erik. He is lost to this world, but he is not lost to her.

Sometimes she wonders. Sometimes she sings.

One day it occurs to her that there is no music at the organ. She searches and searches and cannot find it – where is his _Don Juan Triumphant_, his life's work, the masterpiece she never heard?

Of course. "When I have finished, I shall take it away with me in that coffin and never wake up again."

Erik's voice.

(The coffin is not there anymore.)

She sits at the organ and cautiously brushes her fingers along the keys. It feels like she is touching Erik right now.

His face was disgusting, but his skin was so soft…

It is not so hard to keep one's eyes closed.

She hits one of the keys, fast and hard, before she can change her mind. It is a D-sharp, in the second octave below middle C. The sound reverberates through the house on the lake.

Hesitantly, she sings it. Her voice is an octave too high and it trembles, but the note is the same, and suddenly a hot thrill streaks through her body and her fingers strike another key, an E natural, and quickly she harmonizes and then –

The sun has already risen before she returns to the lake.

* * *

Raoul knows. She is certain of it. But he hasn't stopped her yet, and she can't quite manage to stop herself.

She brings a notebook with her the next night, covered in hastily sketched staffs, and each note she plays or sings is scribbled down. She can't stop. The music consumes her. The organ is so much more _fulfilling_ than her vocal cords alone.

Again she returns home late. And again. She makes up stories for Raoul when he asks her whereabouts. Raoul tells her to stop lying.

Sometimes when she speaks, it is not her voice she uses but Erik's.

But when she sings, it is always her voice that comes through.

* * *

Christine is almost all the way through the notebook, now. For the first time, she wonders what it sounds like, her piece that is not hers.

She flips back to the beginning, through the black and white and grey, and awkwardly sets the pages in front of her. Tentatively, she strikes the first chord, then the second, the third – more strongly now – powerful, beautiful – the scattered sixteenth notes, the vibrations, the _music_ –

And perhaps it is not the _Don Juan Triumphant_.

But it is still Erik.

Because Christine – she wept, when she wrote this piece. But when she hears it, it burns.


End file.
